Charles Constant has narrated 103 audiobooks on Listento.it by 110 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 1,122 ratings. The most-rated is Secrets of the Millionaire Mind.
California Exposures
Summary
"This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." This indelible quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance applies especially well to California, where legend has so thoroughly become fact that it is visible in everyday landscapes. Our foremost historian of the West, Richard White, never content to "print the legend," collaborates here with his son, a talented photographer, in excavating the layers of legend built into California's landscapes. Together they expose the bedrock of the past, and the history they uncover is astonishing. Jesse White's evocative photographs illustrate the sites of Richard's historical investigations. A quiet riverside park in the Tulare Lake Basin belies scenes of horror from when settlers in the 1850s transformed native homelands into American property. Near the lake bed stands a small marker commemorating the Mussel Slough massacre, the culmination of a violent struggle over land titles between local farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s. Tulare is today a fertile agricultural county, but its population is poor and unhealthy. The California Dream lives elsewhere. The lake itself disappeared when tributary rivers were rerouted to deliver government-subsidized water to big agriculture and cities. But climate change ensures that it will be back-the only question is when.
©2020 Richard White and Jesse Amble White (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
The Wrong Man
Summary
"My God...I think they've killed Marilyn!" At 5:40 a.m. on July 4, 1954, the mayor of Bay Village, a small suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, received a frantic phone call from his neighbor Dr. Sam Sheppard. The news was too terrible to comprehend: Marilyn, Sam's lovely wife, was dead, her face and torso beaten beyond recognition by an unknown assailant who had knocked Sam unconscious and escaped just before dawn. In the adjacent bedroom, Chip, the Sheppards' seven-year-old son, had slept through the entire ordeal. Almost immediately, the police began to suspect Sam Sheppard. The local press rushed to cast judgment on the handsome, prosperous doctor. After a misguided investigation, Sheppard was arrested and charged with murder. Sentenced to life in prison, he served for nearly a decade before he was acquitted in a retrial. Until his death, he maintained his innocence. Culled from DNA evidence, testimony that was never heard in court, prison diaries, and interviews with the Sheppard family and other key players, The Wrong Man makes a convincing case for Sheppard's innocence and reveals the identity of the real killer.
©2001 James Neff (P)2019 Tantor
Family Sins
Summary
MURDER IN EDEN Felled by a cowardly shot to the back, Stanton Youngblood has just enough time before he dies to leave a single clue to his killer's identity: the word Wayne, scrawled in his own blood. That word means everything to his widow. Leigh Youngblood was once Leigh Wayne, but she left her wealthy family behind thirty years ago when she fell in love with Stanton, a betrayal the Waynes have never forgiven. Now she publicly vows to discover which of her siblings thinks money and power are enough to cover up a murder. Back in town to find his father's killer, prodigal son Bowie finds his search for justice comes with an unexpected ray of light. He's loved Talia Champion forever, but when she said she couldn't marry him, he left town and never looked back. This time it's Talia who needs him, and it isn't in him to deny her anything. But the killer still has a score to settle, and if that means spilling more blood—so much the better.
©2016 Sharon Sala (P)2016 Harlequin Enterprises, Limited.
Unbreak My Heart
Summary
Sierra Seven years have passed since I fell for Boone West. The brooding bad boy. We were friends, even when I secretly wanted more, but I settled for what he offered. After he left Wyoming - and me - I grew up. Moved on. Or so I believed, until he blew back into my life with the scorching force of an Arizona desert wind. I'm not that innocent 16-year-old girl anymore; I'm a businesswoman who swore never to settle again. But this older, wiser, hotter version of Boone unsettles me. How am I supposed to resist Boone's megawatt smile and his built-army-strong body? Boone Joining the army? Best decision I ever made. Even though it meant I had to leave her behind. Sierra McKay, the wide-eyed beauty who saw more in me than I saw in myself. I didn't dare offer her anything more than friendship, because one kiss, one touch, and I wouldn't have had the guts to go. I've worked hard to become the man I am. I have a career. A purpose. After a chance encounter with the one woman I never forgot, I'm not leaving anything else to chance. Now I'm ready to show her that the passion we couldn't act on before burns hotter than ever between us.
©2016 Lorelei James (P)2016 Tantor
Practicing Normal
Summary
The houses in Pine Estates are beautiful McMansions filled with high-achieving parents, children on the fast track to top colleges, all of the comforts of modern living, and the best security systems money can buy. Welcome to normal upper-middle-class suburbia. The Turners know in their hearts that they're anything but normal. Jenna is a high schooler dressed in black who is fascinated with breaking into her neighbors' homes, security systems be damned. Everett genuinely believes he loves his wife...he just loves having a continuing stream of mistresses more. JT is a genius kid with Asperger's who moves from one obsession to the next. And Kate tries to manage her family, manage her mother (who lives down the street), and avoid wondering why her life is passing her by. And now everything is changing for them. Jenna suddenly finds herself in a boy-next-door romance she never could have predicted. Everett's secrets are beginning to unravel on him. JT is getting his first taste of success at navigating the world. And Kate is facing truths about her husband, her mother, and her father that she might have preferred not to face.
©2016 Cara Sue Achterberg (P)2017 Tantor
Liar's Circus
Summary
"A brilliant, riveting, funny, terrifying journey into the beating heart of Trumpland." (Liza Mundy, author of Code Girls) In this daring work of immersive journalism, based on hundreds of hours of reporting, Carl Hoffman journeys deep inside Donald Trump’s rallies, seeking to understand the strange and powerful tribe that forms the president’s base. Hoffman, who has written about the most dangerous and remote corners of the world, pierced this alternate society, was welcomed in and initiated into its rights and upside-down beliefs, and finally ushered to its inner sanctum. Equally freewheeling and profound, Liar’s Circus tracks the MAGA faithful across 5,000 miles of the American heartland during a crucial arc of the Trump presidency stretching from the impeachment saga to the dawn of the coronavirus pandemic that ended the rallies as we know it. Trump’s rallies are a singular and defining force in American history - a kind of Rosetta stone to understanding the Age of Trump. Yet while much remarked upon, they are, in fact, little examined, with the focus almost always on Trump’s latest outrageous statement. But who are the tens of thousands of people who fill these arenas? What do they see in Trump? And what curious alchemy - between president and adoring crowd - happens there that might explain Trump’s rise and powerful hold over both his base and the GOP? To those on the left, the rallies are a Black Mass of American politics at which Trump plays high priest, recklessly summoning the darkest forces within the nation. To the MAGA faithful, the rallies are a form of pilgrimage, a joyous ceremony that like all rituals binds people together and makes them feel a part of something bigger than themselves. Both sides would acknowledge that this traveling roadshow is the pressurized, combustible core of Trump’s political power, a meeting of the faithful where Trump is unshackled and his rhetoric reaches its most extreme, with downstream consequences for the rest of the nation. To date, no reporter has sought to understand the rallies as a sociological phenomenon examined from the bottom up. Hoffman has done just this. He has stood in line for more than 170 hours with Trump's most ardent superfans and joined them at the very front row; he has traveled from Minnesota to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Hampshire immersing himself in their culture. Liar’s Circus is a revelatory portrait of Trump’s America, from one of our most intrepid journalists.
©2020 Carl Hoffman (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers
See No Evil
Summary
A cunning killer hides in plain sight. A troubled teenage girl has been charged with the grisly murder of her stepfather. The evidence is damning: Emily was found alone at the scene with blood on her hands, and an incriminating email she wrote outlines a murder plot identical to the method of the brutal slaying. But deputy district attorney Julia Chandler believes her niece is innocent, and she's determined to keep the promise she made to protect her dead brother's daughter - even if it means hiring private eye Connor Kincaid...the man who blames her for forcing his resignation from the police department. Together Julia and Connor uncover a chain of unsolved violent crimes tied to an unorthodox therapist whose anonymous online patients purge their anger by posting lethal fantasies. But someone in the group has turned vigilante, turning the game of virtual murder into a flesh-and-blood vendetta. After evil is seen, face your ultimate fear.
©2007 Allison Brennan (P)2019 Tantor
The Invasive
Summary
Bishop is trapped deep inside Montana's Apex Valley along with his injured wife, a shotgun-wielding stranger named Colbrick, and a sneaking suspicion he's never making it back to Chicago. Things no man has seen before haunt the woods. Strange animal species creep behind pine trees, some of them with flashing red tags that blink faster and faster. Giant birds mimic the sound of humans and lord over the sky. Leaf-shaped creatures attack anything that moves and flash vivid colors across their glistening backs. As Bishop and his companions scramble across the Montana wilderness, they find human remains and animal carcasses littering the woods. The small town of Elmore is empty, the windows broken and streaked with blood. Trout Bridge - their only way out - is blocked by abandoned cars, none that were inbound. With the strange animal species closing in, Bishop realizes his group must take a stand. He's got a plan, and maybe they've got one last shot before the invasive species spread to the rest of the US.
©2016 Michael Hodges (P)2017 Tantor
Coastal Breeze
Summary
Breeze is made an offer he can't refuse. A three-million-dollar yacht is his for the taking, but there are strings attached. He's sent to Panama to repossess the vessel from its current captain, who becomes an unlikely ally during a mission to Colombia. He desperately wants to get home to Florida, but the return trip is fraught with problems and complicated by the uneasy relationship with his passenger. Any attempt to come to terms with the loss of his lover must wait for the completion of the journey. A new life awaits if he can stay alive long enough to realize it.
©2019 Ed Robinson (P)2020 Tantor
Becoming Human
Summary
A radical reconsideration of how we develop the qualities that make us human, based on decades of cutting-edge experimental work by the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Here, Michael Tomasello proposes a complementary theory of human uniqueness, focused on development. Building on the seminal ideas of Vygotsky, his data-driven model explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first years of a child's life. Tomasello assembles nearly three decades of experimental work with chimpanzees, bonobos, and human children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that starkly differentiate humans from their closest primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. Becoming Human places human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory and shows how biology creates the conditions under which culture does its work.
©2019 The President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2018 Tantor
Relentless
Summary
An incredible journey of determination and recovery In 2005, Ted W. Baxter was at the top of his game. He was a successful, globe-trotting businessman with a resume that would impress the best of the best. In peak physical condition, Ted worked out nearly every day of the week. And then, on April 21, 2005, all that came to an end. He had a massive ischemic stroke. Doctors feared he wouldn’t make it, or if he did make it, he would be in a vegetative state in a hospital bed for the rest of his life. But miraculously, that’s not what happened.... In Relentless, Ted W. Baxter describes his remarkable recovery. Not only did he live, but he's walking and talking again. He moves through life almost as easily as he did before the stroke; only now, his life is better. He’s learned that having a successful career is maybe not the most important thing. He’s learned to appreciate life more. He's learned that he wants to help people - and that’s what he does. He gives back, volunteering his time and effort to help other stroke victims. Relentless is a wonderful resource for stroke survivors, caregivers, and their loved ones, but it is also an inspiring and motivating read for anyone who is facing struggles in their own life.
©2018 Ted W. Baxter (P)2020 Greenleaf Book Group
Boca Grande Breeze
Summary
Breeze did not want to get involved. He had problems of his own, but when he saw the man on the sailboat punch his partner, he was forced to act. He didn't need a woman around while he plotted his revenge against the man responsible for Brody's death. He was on a mission, and this stranger could only slow him down. This thriller culminates on a remote Florida island, where only one warrior will survive - he who can harness the savage within.
©2019 Ed Robinson (P)2020 Tantor
Metabolical
Summary
The New York Times best-selling author of Fat Chance explains the eight pathologies that underlie all chronic disease, documents how processed food has impacted them to ruin our health, economy, and environment over the past 50 years, and proposes an urgent manifesto and strategy to cure both us and the planet. Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric neuroendocrinologist who has long been on the cutting edge of medicine and science, challenges our current healthcare paradigm which has gone off the rails under the influence of Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Government. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what the problem is. One of Lustig’s singular gifts as a communicator is his ability to “connect the dots” for the general listener, in order to unpack the scientific data and concepts behind his arguments, as he tells the “real story of food” and “the story of real food”. Metabolical weaves the interconnected strands of nutrition, health/disease, medicine, environment, and society into a completely new fabric by proving on a scientific basis a series of iconoclastic revelations, among them: Medicine for chronic disease treats symptoms, not the disease itself You can diagnose your own biochemical profile Chronic diseases are not "druggable", but they are "foodable" Processed food isn’t just toxic, it’s addictive The war between vegan and keto is a false war - the combatants are on the same side Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Government are on the other side Making the case that food is the only lever we have to effect biochemical change to improve our health, Lustig explains what to eat based on two novel criteria: protect the liver, and feed the gut. He insists that if we do not fix our food and change the way we eat, we will continue to court chronic disease, bankrupt healthcare, and threaten the planet. But there is hope: this book explains what’s needed to fix all three.
©2021 Robert H. Lustig (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers
Fearfully and Wonderfully
Summary
Discover this updated and combined edition of two bestselling books! The human body holds endlessly fascinating secrets. The resilience of skin, the strength and structure of the bones, the dynamic balance of the muscles - your physical being is knit according to a pattern of stunning purpose. Now Gold Medallion winners Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and In His Image have been completely revised and updated to offer a new audience timeless reflections on the body. Join renowned leprosy surgeon Dr. Paul Brand and best-selling writer Philip Yancey on a remarkable journey through inner space - a spellbinding account of medical intervention, pain and healing, and the courage of humanity. Discover here the eternal truths revealed by our seemingly ordinary existence. The human body is a window into the very structure of God's creation and a testament to God's glory.
©2019 Dr. Paul Brand, Philip Yancey (P)2019 Dr. Paul Brand, Philip Yancey
Abaco Breeze
Summary
A mysterious detective puts Breeze in a tight spot. Blackmail is the deal of the day, but Breeze isn't buying. Instead, he accepts a mission to rebuild a marina in Marsh Harbor. He assumes the relocation will keep him out of trouble. His assumption is wrong. He becomes a part of the lives of survivors there, as they work together to reclaim a piece of paradise.
©2020 Ed Robinson (P)2021 Tantor
All the Pretty Lies
Summary
What does the tragic death of a 27-year-old Portland beauty have to do with a suburban mother in Houston? Everything. Only Meghan Bishop doesn't know it yet. When the married mother stumbles upon evidence suggesting someone close to her may have ties to the heinous crime the nation can't stop talking about, she's forced to dive headfirst into an ocean of secrets she never knew existed. Unraveling her life one startling piece at a time, Meghan realizes she believed all the pretty lies she'd been told. And the truth? It's uglier than she ever could have imagined.
©2018 Marin Montgomery (P)2018 Tantor
Fear No Evil
Summary
In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream. Instead of preparing for her high school graduation, Lucy Kincaid is facing a vicious execution. Lured by an online predator, she's destined to die horribly - live on the internet - while hundreds of heartless viewers watch and vote on the method of her slaughter. Her family's only hope rests with Kate Donovan, an FBI agent who took on the same sadistic killer once before...and lost. Blamed for another girl's gruesome murder, Kate's been fighting to clear her name. But she agrees to join the hunt for Lucy - and reluctantly steps back into her worst nightmare. With time running out before the bloody webcast airs, Kate teams up with forensic psychiatrist Dillon Kincaid to get inside the head of her twisted quarry, zero in on his chamber of horrors, and reach Lucy before grim history repeats itself and another innocent's brutal death goes hideously live. Face the fear. Speak its name. See its face.
©2007 Allison Brennan (P)2019 Tantor
American Cider
Summary
“Not just a thorough guide to the history of apples and cider in this country but also an inspiring survey of the orchardists and cidermakers devoting their lives to sustainable agriculture through apples.” (Alice Waters) “Pucci and Cavallo are thorough and enthusiastic chroniclers, who celebrate cider’s pomologists and pioneers with infectious curiosity and passion.” (Bianca Bosker, New York Times best-selling author of Cork Dork) Cider today runs the gamut from sweet to dry, smooth to funky, made from apples and sometimes joined by other fruits - and even hopped like beer. In American Cider, aficionados Dan Pucci and Craig Cavallo give a new wave of consumers the tools to taste, talk about, and choose their ciders, along with stories of the many local heroes saving apple culture and producing new varieties. Like wine made from well-known grapes, ciders differ based on the apples they’re made from and where and how those apples were grown. Combining the tasting tools of wine and beer, the authors illuminate the possibilities of this light, flavorful, naturally gluten-free beverage. And cider is more than just its taste - it’s also historical, as the nation’s first popular alcoholic beverage, made from apples brought across the Atlantic from England. Pucci and Cavallo use a region-by-region approach to illustrate how cider and the apples that make it came to be, from the well-known tale of Johnny Appleseed - which isn’t quite what we thought - to the more surprising effects of industrial development and government policies that benefited white men. American Cider is a guide to enjoying cider, but even more so, it is a guide to being part of a community of consumers, farmers, and fermenters making the nation’s oldest beverage its newest must-try drink.
©2021 Dan Pucci (P)2021 Random House Audio
The House Without a Key
Summary
When 17-year-old Maddy Pruitt vanishes from her sleepy town, word on the street is that she ran away. The daughter of an abusive alcoholic with a quick temper, she had every reason to leave in search of something better, and everyone who knew Maddy knew the type of company she kept wasn't always ideal. But when a second 17-year-old girl from a local, affluent family turns up missing shortly after Maddy's disappearance, the circumstances become suspicious. Even though the girls are perfect strangers from opposite sides of town, attended separate schools, and traveled in different social circles, it turns out they have more in common than anyone could have imagined. With the clock ticking, those closest to the girls lead a frantic search, uncovering secrets, lies, and a web of deceit that might have the girls paying an ultimate price...if they don't find them in time. Contains mature themes.
©2019 Marin Montgomery (P)2020 Tantor
Collision on Tenerife
Summary
The world's worst air disaster happened more than 40 years ago on a remote Atlantic Ocean island, when two fully loaded 747 passenger jets collided after a horrendous series of human errors. One of the jets, KLM Flight 4805, was traveling more than 150 miles an hour and was within seconds of lifting off when it crashed into Pan Am Flight 1736 taxiing in its path. The loss of lives was staggering - 583 dead. The crash happened after a lengthy series of major and minor human errors. In the intervening years, has aviation advanced to the point that such a disaster can't happen again? In this riveting account, written from the perspective of the passengers in the cabin as well as the crew members in the cockpits, Jon Ziomek explains how this largely forgotten accident took place - and what has happened since to reduce the possibility of another such catastrophe.
©2018 Jon Ziomek (P)2020 Tantor